Humanity—It’s a Class Thing

We live on an extinction-wracked planet. How did we put ourselves in charge of such destruction, and how do we get out of this role? We must take decisive action to respect the space and nutrients needed by other beings, beings whose own experiences of the world matter. But where is this message to be found? For all our scientific knowledge, humans see ourselves as impossibly special, above biological connections with other life, members of a deceptively insular category. When discussing other animals, we avoid the word “genocide”—which meanskilling a tribe. By thinking of extinction as genocide we pull these erasures from the abstract, and press our minds to reckon with them.

We need to discuss conscious beings without always resorting to the duality of “human and animal”; and how real, anyway, are the species boundaries? Dolphins have tiny, leg-like limb buds during their earliest…